Lost memories can be restored, which offers some hope for patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

The belief has been that memories are stored at the synapses -- the connections between brain cells, or neurons -- which are destroyed by Alzheimer's disease. The new study provides evidence contradicting the idea that long-term memory is stored at synapses.

The Christmas Truce is no stranger to popular entertainment – this year more than any other as its 100th anniversary is marked. The famous moment when British and German soldiers climbed out of the trenches in peace on Christmas Day 1914 has been replicated and ruminated upon in history books, film, and propaganda – and now advertising. In the UK, the supermarket Sainsbury’s 2014 Christmas advert dramatizes the event, prompting cries of outrage that it has trivialized it.

But what really happened 100 years ago?

After a year in which further details of national intelligence agencies' shadowy surveillance networks were laid bare, a fresh leak of documents reveals the obsessive surveillance that extends as far north as Lapland.

Santa’s Arctic Workshop (SAW) has deployed a multinational panopticon surveillance program, according to leaked documents being called “the Snowman Files”.

Smile, though your heart is aching. Morgan, CC BY

By Annie Austin, University of Manchester

The evolutionary adaptations of ancient lobe-finned fish transformed pectoral fins used underwater into strong, bony structures that enabled emerging tetrapods, animals with limbs, to allow them crawl in shallow water or on land. 

The disconnect between paleontology and evolutionary biology has been why the modern structure called the autopod, comprising wrists and fingers or ankles and toes, has no obvious morphological counterpart in the fins of living fishes. 

The oldest recorded stone tool found to-date has been unearthed in Turkey.

The chance find of a humanly-worked quartzite flake, in ancient deposits of the river Gediz in western Turkey, show that humans passed through the gateway from Asia to Europe much earlier than previously thought, approximately 1.2 million years ago and provides new insight into when and how early humans dispersed out of Africa and Asia.

The international team used high-precision equipment to date the deposits of the ancient river meander, giving the first accurate time-frame for when humans occupied the area.

Francesco Botticini's The Assumption of the Virgin shows the heavenly hierarchies at play.

By Martin Parker, University of Leicester

Our Milky Way is part of a cluster of more than 50 galaxies that make up the ‘Local Group’, a collection that includes the famous Andromeda galaxy and many other far smaller objects.

And now one more, a tiny and isolated dwarf galaxy almost 7 million light years away, named KKs3. KKs3 was found using the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in August 2014 in the southern sky in the direction of the constellation of Hydrus and its stars have only one ten-thousandth of the mass of the Milky Way.

In the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), British MI6 agent James Bond designed his own martini, comprising three measures of Gordon's gin, one of vodka and half a measure of Kine Lillet (vermouth) shaken until it's ice cold and served with a slice of lemon peel.

He named it a 'Vesper' after his love interest Vesper Lynd but he never drank the Vesper again in the books.

Shaking a martini was...working class. Drink experts knew then and know now that you don't do it, because it aerates the drink as ice breaks off. You shake drinks with egg or citrus. It is believed that Fleming had his anti-hero order it shaken to thumb his nose at elites.

We might think that Christmas is more commercial now than in the past - and the season certainly starts earlier - but when it comes to one key barometer the 1950s were pretty bad.

Though the 1950s had lots of cultural problems compared to today, economically things were much better, with lower taxes, less government interference, and most families having only one parent forced to work outside the home. And that meant spending money, but there were no malls or online retailers so everyone had to come into town to shop.